Vitalik Buterin Proposes 'Low-Tech' Approach To Boost Privacy With NFT Transactions

Ethereum ETH/USD creator Vitalik Buterin outlined a “low-tech” approach to adding a significant amount of privacy to the NFT ecosystem.

What Happened: In a blog post shared on Monday, Buterin suggested incorporating stealth addresses for ERC 721 tokens.

“So you would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is,” he said.

Idea: stealth addresses for ERC721s.

A low-tech approach to add a significant amount of privacy to the NFT ecosystem.

So you would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is.https://t.co/UdqK6NAYjn

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 8, 2022

This way of anonymizing NFT transactions would come with a fair share of challenges, one of them being how to pay gas fees. 

“The best I can come up with is, if you send someone an ERC721 also send along enough ETH to pay fees 5-50 times to send it further. If you get an ERC721 without enough ETH, then you can tornado some ETH in to keep the transfer chain going,” said Buterin, referring to the crypto asset mixer Tornado Cash TORN/USD.

Tornado Cash was recently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for its alleged use in laundering stolen funds. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) estimated that Tornado has helped launder over $7 billion in digital assets, Benzinga reported earlier today.

Price Action: At press time, ETH was trading at $1,770, up 4.07% over the last 24 hours, according to data from Benzinga Pro.